The latest innovations in Social Media Advertising

CitizenNet Granted Patent for Social Media Trends

CitizenNet continues to be at the forefront of social media innovation. Our team of data scientists and engineers works tirelessly to create technologies that deliver better outcomes for social media advertisers.

Social Media Trend Identification

Trends are clearly an important element to understanding social media -- so much so that the term "trending" entered popular vernacular. As social media users, we all know that trending items are a good gauge of what is happening now and what is likely fodder for watercooler conversions tomorrow. For marketers, the ability to detect these trends and engage in relevant conversations as they happen is a key to success in social media.

CitizenNet observed that known methods of detecting social media trends were only truly good at detecting large changes in conversations -- for example breaking news, where the social chatter moves from virtually zero conversations to a much higher volume very quickly.

While this may be interesting to marketers, breaking news is easy to find and social media may not be the best channel for finding this information to identify social media trends for targeting or messaging strategy. Additionally, these types of trends are generally exhibited by very broad audiences, which limits the effectiveness of this type of trend identification for any but the largest advertisers.

Social Media Trends Surrounding Specific Products

The CitizenNet development team set out to find social media trends within a more defined segment of users -- for instance, fans of a particular brand or product. This type of trend spreads through a social network less like a piece of breaking news and more like “meme” -- a thematic concept that consistently weaves in and out of conversations. In tackling this unique challenge, the team devised a novel and efficient way of detecting trends and memes by analyzing a stream of words. The algorithm is small, enabling CitizenNet to observe social media trends surrounding every keyword that the system processes.

Trend Detection and Advertising Performance

For advertisers, trend detection often plays a role in identifying important keywords and interests to target in ad campaigns. For example, two keywords may historically demonstrate the same volume and be expected to generate the same response with a target audience. However, one of these keywords may increase in frequency and importance as it becomes part of a meme and its use spreads within the social media conversations of that audience.

This often* indicates that the keyword is currently more relevant, and will deliver better engagement with the target audience, as well as a higher volume of targeted impressions.

By incorporating this trend detection algorithm into our Predicted Affinity audience targeting, CitizenNet enables our clients to better identify audiences that are likely to have a strong response rate to specific offers around particular products and services.

The audience identification occurs automatically, based on real-time data analysis and ensures our clients generate the maximum return from their social media advertising.

* This predicted relevance is tested automatically by the platform using actual ad performance as the gauge. Marketers should always be wary of "social analytics" vendors and tools that make recommendations without the validation of a feedback loop.